STEP 4:
Review Your Content

Thoroughly review your existing content rather than automatically inserting it into any templates. Consider the following when reviewing your content:

• Identify missing or outdated content--Does your site lack information that your audience members would reasonably expect to be on your site? Is there stale content on your site? In most cases, no content is better than outdated content.
• Assess usefulness--Evaluate the reasoning behind including each piece of content on your site. Do not include content for its own sake; you will just end up unnecessarily complicating your site.
• Web-enabled content--Does your content lend itself to the Web? Do you break large documents into easily managed chunks? Do you hyperlink to related material as needed? Do you have a printer-friendly version of pages that are often printed?
• Redundancy--Make sure that you are not duplicating content that can be found in other places in the University's Web presence. For instance, an academic department's site could link to its course listings on the Academic Bulletins site rather than duplicating it with a customized version. This could be accomplished with a pop-up window so the user will not be led away from your site.
• Identify content writers--Who are the best people to write (or review) a piece of content? Are they available? Do they understand how to write for the Web? Have they reviewed the Editorial Style Guide provided by University Publications?
• Assign content--Make assignments to the content writers that you identified. Allocate time to review their content to make sure it is appropriate and integrates well with the rest of the site.
• Consider maintenance--Have a plan ready for maintaining your content. For frequently changing content, make sure that someone is responsible for updating it on a regular basis. Consider a backup plan in case a content writer becomes unavailable short-term (e.g., vacation, sickness) or long-term (e.g., leaves his or her position).
• Grammar, Spelling, and Style--Be sure to proof read all content for grammar and spelling errors. You may want to run your pages through an HTML-aware spell checker. Also be sure that your content's style is consistent and follows the guidelines for editing as outlined in the Editorial Style Guide.

Required Content and Features
Every page in your site should have an appropriate HTML TITLE tag; the TITLE tag is typically rendered in the title bar of the browser window. The title should contain the acronym USC and be concise and unique. Since the title is typically used as a bookmark's default description, consider how you would like a user to remember your page in a long list of bookmarks.

Prohibited Content and Features
As the flagship research university in South Carolina, USC's Web presence must be an example of professionalism, usability, and consistency. The following content and features are disallowed on USC Web sites:

• Frames--Frames corrupt usability and interfere with search engine indexing and bookmarks.
• "Splash" pages--A splash page (a branding page that appears before a site's home page) frequently adds no useful content to a Web site.
• Navigation which requires Flash, Java, or JavaScript to function--All pages in a site should be able to be reached with a browser than only understands straight HTML. For instance, many main University Web pages use JavaScript to enhance the navigation with rollovers and tool-tips. Although these extra features do not appear in browsers without JavaScript support, the navigation labels and links still work as expected. Enhancing an interface with JavaScript is allowed, but requiring JavaScript for a page to function properly is unacceptable.
• Hit counters--Hit counters typically do not provide accurate or useful content to users. Virtually all web servers generate log files that can be processed to generate useful statistics about your visits.
• Blinking text--Blinking text in general is considered an annoyance.
• "Under Construction" notices--If a page is under construction, do not place it online until it contains useful, relevant content.

Additional Links:
• Required and Prohibited Content


Jakob Nielsen, a well-known usability expert, noted in Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity that "ultimately, all users visit your Web site for its content. Everything else is just the backdrop." Nielsen's three guidelines for writing for the Web are:

• Be succinct--Write no more than 50 percent of the text you would have used to cover the same material in a print publication.
• Write for scannability--Don't require users to read long continuous blocks of text; instead, use short paragraphs, subheadings, and bulleted lists.
• Use hypertext to split up long information into multiple pages.